Pipe hardlinking is wonderful. It lets you do something you can really do nowhere else but e2. Pipe-hardlink, and suddenly your writing is no longer a simple line; suddenly your writing is
two-dimensional. Besides the ordinary flow, you have an entire second
layer that can be effortlessly peeled off to show something else.
Closed-captioning for the
metaphorically
impaired would be one method of
systematically hardlinking your writeup where you use the
pipe to
use hardlinks to say two things at once.
The idea is, if you're using an
extended analogy throughout the entire writeup, you can use the hardlinks to strengthen the bonds between the words you are saying and the
corresponding things behind the metaphor they represent.
In this particular methodology you throw out the normal intention behind hardlinks; all hard links should be used in some way to point out a connection. Hard links should be to show exactly where the metaphors link up. Any given thing can be anchored in place, so someone unfamiliar with the analogy can have it mapped out for them. If you do this, you should try to do it consistently and constantly throughout the writeup, and avoid any non-metaphor-demonstrating (normal) hardlinks, because it waters down the metaphor and prevents them from thinking everything has been thought out and worked out. Plus, if the only hardlinks are part of the metaphor, you can hardlink a word or phrase to itself to imply that one concept works exactly the same on both sides of the analogy, without it just looking ordinary and easy to miss the purpose of.
The nice thing about this is that you can be sure that every single point is explained completely, without dumbing down or having to include constant, clumsy explanations of the metaphor; the explanations are annotated and embedded into the text. The reader can choose their own level of subtlety.
For an example of this, see my writeups under wicca is like linux or if linux distributions were airlines. The aren't great examples, but they're demonstrative.